Learning MAC Addresses and Frames Flooding

MAC Address -

A Media Access Control address (MAC address) is a unique identifier assigned to network interfaces for communications on the physical network segment. MAC addresses are used for numerous network technologies and most IEEE 802 network technologies, including Ethernet. Logically, MAC addresses are used in the Media Access Control protocol sub-layer of the OSI reference model.

MAC addresses are most often assigned by the manufacturer of a network interface card (NIC) and are stored in its hardware, the card's read-only memory, or some other firmware mechanism. If assigned by the manufacturer, a MAC address usually encodes the manufacturer's registered identification number and may be referred to as the burned-in address. It may also be known as an Ethernet hardware address (EHA), hardware address or physical address. A network node may have multiple NICs and will then have one unique MAC address per NIC.

MAC addresses are formed according to the rules of one of three numbering name spaces managed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): MAC-48, EUI-48, and EUI-64. The IEEE claims trademarks on the names EUI-48 and EUI-64, in which EUI is an abbreviation for Extended Unique Identifier.

The standard (IEEE 802) format for printing MAC-48 addresses in human-friendly form is six groups of two hexadecimal digits, separated by hyphens (-) or colons (:), in transmission order (e.g. 01-23-45-67-89-ab or 01:23:45:67:89:ab ). This form is also commonly used for EUI-64. Another convention used by networking equipment uses three groups of four hexadecimal digits separated by dots (.) (e.g. 0123.4567.89ab ), again in transmission order.

MAC Addressing -

Frame Flooding
MAC flooding is a technique employed to compromise the security of network switches.

Switches maintain a CAM Table that maps individual MAC addresses on the network to the physical ports on the switch. This allows the switch to direct data out of the physical port where the recipient is located, as opposed to indiscriminately broadcasting the data out of all ports as a hub does. The advantage of this method is that data is bridged exclusively to the network segment containing the computer that the data is specifically destined for.

In a typical MAC flooding attack, a switch is fed many Ethernet frames, each containing different source MAC addresses, by the attacker. The intention is to consume the limited memory set aside in the switch to store the MAC address table.

The effect of this attack may vary across implementations, however the desired effect (by the attacker) is either for legitimate MAC addresses to be forced out of the MAC address table causing significant quantities of incoming frames to be flooded out on all ports. It is from this flooding behavior that the MAC flooding attack gets its name, and it is this behavior which allows the MAC flooding attack to be used as more than a simple denial-of-service attack against the switching infrastructure.

After launching a successful MAC flooding attack, a malicious user could then use a packet analyzer to capture sensitive data being transmitted between other computers, which would not be accessible were the switch operating normally. The attacker may also follow up with an ARP spoofing attack which will allow them to retain access to privileged data after switches recover from the initial MAC flooding attack.

Counter measures

To prevent MAC flooding attacks, network operators usually rely on the presence of one or more features in their network equipment:

With a feature often called "port security" by vendors, many advanced switches can be configured to limit the number of MAC addresses that can be learned on ports connected to end stations. A smaller table of "secure" MAC addresses is maintained in addition to (and as a subset to) the traditional "MAC address table."

Many vendors allow discovered MAC addresses to be authenticated against an authentication, authorization and accounting (AAA) server and subsequently filtered.

Implementations of IEEE 802.1X suites often allow packet filtering rules to be installed explicitly by an AAA server based on dynamically learned information about clients, including the MAC address.

Security features to prevent ARP spoofing or IP address spoofing in some cases may also perform additional MAC address filtering on unicast packets, however this is an implementation-dependent side-effect.

Additional security measures are sometimes applied along with the above to prevent normal unicast flooding for unknown MAC addresses.This feature usually relies on the "port security" feature to retain all "secure" MAC addresses for at least as long as they remain in the ARP table of layer 3 devices. Hence, the aging time of learned "secure" MAC addresses is separately adjustable. This feature prevents packets from flooding under normal operational circumstances, as well as mitigating the effects of a MAC flood attack.